Allie Finkle's Rules for Girls: Stage Fright Read Free

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    I was pretty sure the announcement was going to be about my mom getting the job as film reviewer on Good News! I wasn’t certain how Mrs. Hunter found out about it. Maybe she’d ordered a pizza from Pizza Express and Uncle Jay had told her. I’d asked Uncle Jay once if he’d ever delivered a pizza to Mrs. Hunter (because I wanted to know if she lived in a house or an apartment, and if she lived in an apartment did it have an elevator), and he said he’d never delivered a pizza to her.
    But you never knew.
    Anyway, we all sat very silently in our seats, waiting for the announcement, because Mrs. Hunter, even as pretty as she is with her nice eye makeup and her high-heeled boots, could be very scary when she wanted to be.
    I was totally hoping the announcement would be about my mom, because that would make Cheyenne sorry for what she’d done out on the playground. I could just picture how badly Cheyenne would want to come over to my house once she found out my mom was a TV star. Not that I’d ever let Cheyenne come over to my house. Not after the way she’d treated me and my friends. Cheyenne didn’t like to play fun games like super spy (pretending to be a spy by seeing how quietly you could walk around the house and spy on the people in it without getting caught) and science experiment (mixing up all the different cleansers you find under the bathroom sink to see how many it took before you could make an explosion…something we’d never managed successfully so far. But we’d made some really bad smells).
    Cheyenne only liked to call boys and ask them if they liked her. Cheyenne is officially boring. That’s a rule.
    Still. It would be very satisfying to say, “I don’t think so,” when Cheyenne begged to come home for lunch with me (Cheyenne thought going home for lunch was the height of dorkiness and that getting a hot lunch, like she and Marianne and Dominique did, was the epitome of cool).
    What I didn’t want the announcement to be was that Mrs. Hunter was going away on vacation and that we were going to have a substitute teacher. Mrs. Hunter had made an announcement like that once before and it hadn’t worked out so well. At least, not when the substitute, Mr. White, showed up, since some of the boys in the class had decided it would be a good idea to change seats for the week and pretend to be each other. Stuart Maxwell had given Rosemary and me five boxes of Nerds each in exchange for not telling.
    “Children,” Mrs. Hunter said as we all sat dreading the return of Mr. White. (It’s embarrassing to watch a grown man cry.) “It is the time of year when all the classes begin preparing for the presentation they’re going to put on for the Pine Heights Elementary School open house. That’s when we invite your parents here to school one evening and put on a little performance to show them what we’ve been learning this semester. Each grade gets a separate night, and each class within that grade does something different. Mrs. Danielson’s class, for instance, is going to put on a presentation about early settlers to this area, which, as you know, we’ve been studying recently.”
    I nearly threw up when I heard this. Not because I was nervous about putting on a presentation. But because putting on a presentation about early settlers to the United States sounded so boring. No offense, but if I had been an early settler to the United States, I’d have gone back to where I came from. First of all, you had to go to the bathroom in an outhouse. That is a bathroom that is outside of the house, if you know what I mean.
    And all the grades in the whole school were in one room! Which would have meant I’d have had to be in the same room as my little brothers all day.
    It’s bad enough having to live in the same house with my brothers outside of school! I’m not spending all day at school in the same room with them.
    I was getting a very bad feeling about what we were going to have to do for our